This volume presents the peer-reviewed proceedings of the international conference Imaging, Vision and Learning Based on Optimization and PDEs (IVLOPDE), held in Bergen, Norway, in August/September 2016. The contributions cover state-of-the-art research on mathematical techniques for image processing, computer vision and machine learning based on optimization and partial differential equations (PDEs). It has become an established paradigm to formulate problems within image processing and computer vision as PDEs, variational problems or finite dimensional optimization problems. This compact yet expressive framework makes it possible to incorporate a range of desired properties of the solutions and to design algorithms based on well-founded mathematical theory. A growing body of research has also approached more general problems within data analysis and machine learning from the same perspective, and demonstrated the advantages over earlier, more established algorithms. This volume will appeal to all mathematicians and computer scientists interested in novel techniques and analytical results for optimization, variational models and PDEs, together with experimental results on applications ranging from early image formation to high-level image and data analysis.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of ensemble learning in the field of feature selection (FS), which consists of combining the output of multiple methods to obtain better results than any single method. It reviews various techniques for combining partial results, measuring diversity and evaluating ensemble performance. With the advent of Big Data, feature selection (FS) has become more necessary than ever to achieve dimensionality reduction. With so many methods available, it is difficult to choose the most appropriate one for a given setting, thus making the ensemble paradigm an interesting alternative. The authors first focus on the foundations of ensemble learning and classical approaches, before diving into the specific aspects of ensembles for FS, such as combining partial results, measuring diversity and evaluating ensemble performance. Lastly, the book shows examples of successful applications of ensembles for FS and introduces the new challenges that researchers now face. As such, the book offers a valuable guide for all practitioners, researchers and graduate students in the areas of machine learning and data mining.

This book covers the key advances in computerized facial beauty analysis, with an emphasis on data-driven research and the results of quantitative experiments. It takes a big step toward practical facial beauty analysis, proposes more reliable and stable facial features for beauty analysis and designs new models, methods, algorithms and schemes while implementing a facial beauty analysis and beautification system. This book also tests some previous putative rules and models for facial beauty analysis by using computationally efficient mathematical models and algorithms, especially large scale database-based and repeatable experiments.The first section of this book provides an overview of facial beauty analysis. The base of facial beauty analysis, i.e., facial beauty features, is presented in part two. Part three describes hypotheses on facial beauty, while part four defines data-driven facial beauty analysis models. This book concludes with the authors explaining how to implement their new facial beauty analysis system.This book is designed for researchers, professionals and post graduate students working in the field of facial beauty analysis, computer vision, human-machine interface, pattern recognition and biometrics. Those involved in interdisciplinary fields with also find the contents useful. The ideas, means and conclusions for beauty analysis are valuable for researchers and the system design and implementation can be used as models for practitioners and engineers.

This book generalizes and extends the available theory in robust and decentralized hypothesis testing. In particular, it presents a robust test for modeling errors which is independent from the assumptions that a sufficiently large number of samples is available, and that the distance is the KL-divergence. Here, the distance can be chosen from a much general model, which includes the KL-divergence as a very special case. This is then extended by various means. A minimax robust test that is robust against both outliers as well as modeling errors is presented. Minimax robustness properties of the given tests are also explicitly proven for fixed sample size and sequential probability ratio tests. The theory of robust detection is extended to robust estimation and the theory of robust distributed detection is extended to classes of distributions, which are not necessarily stochastically bounded. It is shown that the quantization functions for the decision rules can also be chosen as non-monotone. Finally, the book describes the derivation of theoretical bounds in minimax decentralized hypothesis testing, which have not yet been known. As a timely report on the state-of-the-art in robust hypothesis testing, this book is mainly intended for postgraduates and researchers in the field of electrical and electronic engineering, statistics and applied probability. Moreover, it may be of interest for students and researchers working in the field of classification, pattern recognition and cognitive radio.

This book explores novel aspects of social robotics, spoken dialogue systems, human-robot interaction, spoken language understanding, multimodal communication, and system evaluation. It offers a variety of perspectives on and solutions to the most important questions about advanced techniques for social robots and chat systems. Chapters by leading researchers address key research and development topics in the field of spoken dialogue systems, focusing in particular on three special themes: dialogue state tracking, evaluation of human-robot dialogue in social robotics, and socio-cognitive language processing. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in both academia and industry whose work involves advanced interaction technology and who are seeking an up-to-date overview of the key topics. It also provides supplementary educational material for courses on state-of-the-art dialogue system technologies, social robotics, and related research fields.

This book captures the current challenges in automatic recognition of emotion in spontaneous speech and makes an effort to explain, elaborate, and propose possible solutions. Intelligent human-computer interaction (iHCI) systems thrive on several technologies like automatic speech recognition (ASR); speaker identification; language identification; image and video recognition; affect/mood/emotion analysis; and recognition, to name a few. Given the importance of spontaneity in any human-machine conversational speech, reliable recognition of emotion from naturally spoken spontaneous speech is crucial. While emotions, when explicitly demonstrated by an actor, are easy for a machine to recognize, the same is not true in the case of day-to-day, naturally spoken spontaneous speech. The book explores several reasons behind this, but one of the main reasons for this is that people, especially non-actors, do not explicitly demonstrate their emotion when they speak, thus making it difficult for machines to distinguish one emotion from another that is embedded in their spoken speech. This short book, based on some of authors' previously published books, in the area of audio emotion analysis, identifies the practical challenges in analysing emotions in spontaneous speech and puts forward several possible solutions that can assist in robustly determining the emotions expressed in spontaneous speech.

This book highlights recent research advances in unsupervised learning using natural computing techniques such as artificial neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, artificial immune systems, artificial life, quantum computing, DNA computing, and others. The book also includes information on the use of natural computing techniques for unsupervised learning tasks. It features several trending topics, such as big data scalability, wireless network analysis, engineering optimization, social media, and complex network analytics. It shows how these applications have triggered a number of new natural computing techniques to improve the performance of unsupervised learning methods. With this book, the readers can easily capture new advances in this area with systematic understanding of the scope in depth. Readers can rapidly explore new methods and new applications at the junction between natural computing and unsupervised learning. Includes advances on unsupervised learning using natural computing techniques Reports on topics in emerging areas such as evolutionary multi-objective unsupervised learning Features natural computing techniques such as evolutionary multi-objective algorithms and many-objective swarm intelligence algorithms

This book presents the key technology of electronic noses, and systematically describes how e-noses can be used to automatically analyse odours. Appealing to readers from the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, electrical engineering, electronics, and instrumentation science, it addresses three main areas: First, readers will learn how to apply machine learning, pattern recognition and signal processing algorithms to real perception tasks. Second, they will be shown how to make their algorithms match their systems once the algorithms don't work because of the limitation of hardware resources. Third, readers will learn how to make schemes and solutions when the acquired data from their systems is not stable due to the fundamental issues affecting perceptron devices (e.g. sensors). In brief, the book presents and discusses the key technologies and new algorithmic challenges in electronic noses and artificial olfaction. The goal is to promote the industrial application of electronic nose technology in environmental detection, medical diagnosis, food quality control, explosive detection, etc. and to highlight the scientific advances in artificial olfaction and artificial intelligence. The book offers a good reference guide for newcomers to the topic of electronic noses, because it refers to the basic principles and algorithms. At the same time, it clearly presents the key challenges - such as long-term drift, signal uniqueness, and disturbance - and effective and efficient solutions, making it equally valuable for researchers engaged in the science and engineering of sensors, instruments, chemometrics, etc.

This book introduces the challenges of robotic tactile perception and task understanding, and describes an advanced approach based on machine learning and sparse coding techniques. Further, a set of structured sparse coding models is developed to address the issues of dynamic tactile sensing. The book then proves that the proposed framework is effective in solving the problems of multi-finger tactile object recognition, multi-label tactile adjective recognition and multi-category material analysis, which are all challenging practical problems in the fields of robotics and automation. The proposed sparse coding model can be used to tackle the challenging visual-tactile fusion recognition problem, and the book develops a series of efficient optimization algorithms to implement the model. It is suitable as a reference book for graduate students with a basic knowledge of machine learning as well as professional researchers interested in robotic tactile perception and understanding, and machine learning.

The book gives an introduction into the theory and practice of the transdisciplinary field of Character Computing, introduced by Alia El Bolock. The latest scientific findings indicate that "One size DOES NOT fit all" in terms of how to design interactive systems and predict behavior to tailor the interaction experience. Emotions are one of the essential factors that influence people's daily experiences; they influence decision making and how different emotions are interpreted by different individuals. For example, some people may perform better under stress and others may break. Building upon Rosalind Picard's vision, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions and how different characters perceive and react to these emotions, hence having richer and truly tailored interaction experiences. Psychological processes or personality traits are embedded in the existing fields of Affective and Personality Computing. However, this book is the first that systematically addresses this including the whole human character; namely our stable personality traits, our variable affective, cognitive and motivational states as well as our morals, beliefs and socio-cultural embedding. The book gives an introduction into the theory and practice of the transdisciplinary field of Character Computing. The emerging field leverages Computer Science and Psychology to extend technology to include the whole character of humans and thus paves the way for researchers to truly place humans at the center of any technological development. Character Computing is presented from three main perspectives: Profiling and sensing the character Leveraging characters to build ubiquitous character-aware systems Investigating how to extend Artificial Intelligence to create artificial characters

This book offers readers a single-source reference to the implementation aspects of multirate systems, advances in design of comb decimation filters and multirate filter banks. The authors describe a variety of the most recent applications in fields such as, image and video processing, digital communications, software and cognitive radio.

This book focuses on how machine learning techniques can be used to analyze and make use of one particular category of behavioral biometrics known as the gait biometric. A comprehensive Ground Reaction Force (GRF)-based Gait Biometrics Recognition framework is proposed and validated by experiments. In addition, an in-depth analysis of existing recognition techniques that are best suited for performing footstep GRF-based person recognition is also proposed, as well as a comparison of feature extractors, normalizers, and classifiers configurations that were never directly compared with one another in any previous GRF recognition research. Finally, a detailed theoretical overview of many existing machine learning techniques is presented, leading to a proposal of two novel data processing techniques developed specifically for the purpose of gait biometric recognition using GRF. This book * introduces novel machine-learning-based temporal normalization techniques * bridges research gaps concerning the effect of footwear and stepping speed on footstep GRF-based person recognition * provides detailed discussions of key research challenges and open research issues in gait biometrics recognition* compares biometrics systems trained and tested with the same footwear against those trained and tested with different footwear

Although the capabilities of computer image analysis do not yet match those of the human visual system, recent developments have made great progress towards tackling the challenges posed by the perceptual analysis of images.

This unique text/reference highlights a selection of important, practical applications of advanced image analysis methods for medical images. The book covers the complete methodology for processing, analysing and interpreting diagnostic results of sample computed tomography (CT) images. The text also presents significant problems related to new approaches and paradigms in image understanding and semantic image analysis. To further engage the reader, example source code is provided for the implemented algorithms in the described solutions.

Topics and features: describes the most important methods and algorithms used for image analysis, including holistic and syntactic methods; examines the fundamentals of cognitive computer image analysis for computer-aided diagnosis and semantic image description, introducing the cognitive resonance model; presents original approaches for the semantic analysis of CT perfusion and CT angiography images of the brain and carotid artery; discusses techniques for creating 3D visualisations of large datasets, and efficient and reliable algorithms for 3D rendering; reviews natural user interfaces in medical imaging systems, covering innovative Gesture Description Language technology; concludes with a summary of significant developments in advanced image recognition techniques and their practical applications, along with possible directions for future research.

This cutting-edge work is an invaluable practical resource for researchers and professionals interested in medical informatics, computer-aided diagnosis, computer graphics, and intelligent information systems.

This text presents a wide-ranging and rigorous overview of nearest neighbor methods, one of the most important paradigms in machine learning. Now in one self-contained volume, this book systematically covers key statistical, probabilistic, combinatorial and geometric ideas for understanding, analyzing and developing nearest neighbor methods. Gerard Biau is a professor at Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris). Luc Devroye is a professor at the School of Computer Science at McGill University (Montreal).

This textbook presents the main principles of visual analytics and describes techniques and approaches that have proven their utility and can be readily reproduced. Special emphasis is placed on various instructive examples of analyses, in which the need for and the use of visualisations are explained in detail. The book begins by introducing the main ideas and concepts of visual analytics and explaining why it should be considered an essential part of data science methodology and practices. It then describes the general principles underlying the visual analytics approaches, including those on appropriate visual representation, the use of interactive techniques, and classes of computational methods. It continues with discussing how to use visualisations for getting aware of data properties that need to be taken into account and for detecting possible data quality issues that may impair the analysis. The second part of the book describes visual analytics methods and workflows, organised by various data types including multidimensional data, data with spatial and temporal components, data describing binary relationships, texts, images and video. For each data type, the specific properties and issues are explained, the relevant analysis tasks are discussed, and appropriate methods and procedures are introduced. The focus here is not on the micro-level details of how the methods work, but on how the methods can be used and how they can be applied to data. The limitations of the methods are also discussed and possible pitfalls are identified. The textbook is intended for students in data science and, more generally, anyone doing or planning to do practical data analysis. It includes numerous examples demonstrating how visual analytics techniques are used and how they can help analysts to understand the properties of data, gain insights into the subject reflected in the data, and build good models that can be trusted. Based on several years of teaching related courses at the City, University of London, the University of Bonn and TU Munich, as well as industry training at the Fraunhofer Institute IAIS and numerous summer schools, the main content is complemented by sample datasets and detailed, illustrated descriptions of exercises to practice applying visual analytics methods and workflows.

This book offers an introduction to modern natural language processing using machine learning, focusing on how neural networks create a machine interpretable representation of the meaning of natural language. Language is crucially linked to ideas - as Webster's 1923 "English Composition and Literature" puts it: "A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought". Thus the representation of sentences and the words that make them up is vital in advancing artificial intelligence and other "smart" systems currently being developed. Providing an overview of the research in the area, from Bengio et al.'s seminal work on a "Neural Probabilistic Language Model" in 2003, to the latest techniques, this book enables readers to gain an understanding of how the techniques are related and what is best for their purposes. As well as a introduction to neural networks in general and recurrent neural networks in particular, this book details the methods used for representing words, senses of words, and larger structures such as sentences or documents. The book highlights practical implementations and discusses many aspects that are often overlooked or misunderstood. The book includes thorough instruction on challenging areas such as hierarchical softmax and negative sampling, to ensure the reader fully and easily understands the details of how the algorithms function. Combining practical aspects with a more traditional review of the literature, it is directly applicable to a broad readership. It is an invaluable introduction for early graduate students working in natural language processing; a trustworthy guide for industry developers wishing to make use of recent innovations; and a sturdy bridge for researchers already familiar with linguistics or machine learning wishing to understand the other.

This book provides a broad yet detailed introduction to neural networks and machine learning in a statistical framework. A single, comprehensive resource for study and further research, it explores the major popular neural network models and statistical learning approaches with examples and exercises and allows readers to gain a practical working understanding of the content. This updated new edition presents recently published results and includes six new chapters that correspond to the recent advances in computational learning theory, sparse coding, deep learning, big data and cloud computing. Each chapter features state-of-the-art descriptions and significant research findings. The topics covered include: * multilayer perceptron; * the Hopfield network; * associative memory models;* clustering models and algorithms; * t he radial basis function network; * recurrent neural networks; * nonnegative matrix factorization; * independent component analysis; *probabilistic and Bayesian networks; and * fuzzy sets and logic. Focusing on the prominent accomplishments and their practical aspects, this book provides academic and technical staff, as well as graduate students and researchers with a solid foundation and comprehensive reference on the fields of neural networks, pattern recognition, signal processing, and machine learning.

Describing several new biometric technologies, such as high-resolution fingerprint, finger-knuckle-print, multi-spectral backhand, 3D fingerprint, tongueprint, 3D ear, and multi-spectral iris recognition technologies, this book analyzes a number of efficient feature extraction, matching and fusion algorithms and how potential systems have been developed. Focusing on how to develop new biometric technologies based on the requirements of applications, and how to design efficient algorithms to deliver better performance, the work is based on the author's research with experimental results under different challenging conditions described in the text. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers, professionals and postgraduate students working in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, biometrics, and security applications, amongst others.

This book offers comprehensive coverage of information retrieval by considering both Text Based Information Retrieval (TBIR) and Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), together with new research topics. The approach to TBIR is based on creating a thesaurus, as well as event classification and detection. N-gram thesaurus generation for query refinement offers a new method for improving the precision of retrieval, while event classification and detection approaches aid in the classification and organization of information using web documents for domain-specific retrieval applications. In turn, with regard to content based image retrieval (CBIR) the book presents a histogram construction method, which is based on human visual perceptions of color. The book's overarching goal is to introduce readers to new ideas in an easy-to-follow manner.

Re-identification offers a useful tool for non-invasive biometric validation, surveillance, and human-robot interaction in a broad range of applications from crowd traffic management to personalised healthcare.

This comprehensive volume is the first work of its kind dedicated to addressing the challenge of "Person Re-Identification," presenting insights from an international selection of leading authorities in the field. Taking a strongly multidisciplinary approach, the text provides an in-depth discussion of recent developments and state-of-the-art methods drawn from the computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning communities, embracing both fundamental research and practical applications.

Topics and features: introduces examples of robust feature representations, reviews salient feature weighting and selection mechanisms, and examines the benefits of semantic attributes; describes how to segregate meaningful body parts from background clutter; examines the use of 3D depth images, and contextual constraints derived from the visual appearance of a group; reviews approaches to feature transfer function and distance metric learning, and discusses potential solutions to issues of data scalability and identity inference; investigates the limitations of existing benchmark datasets, presents strategies for camera topology inference, and describes techniques for improving post-rank search efficiency; explores the design rationale and implementation considerations of building a practical re-identification system.

This timely collection will be of great interest to academics, industrial researchers and postgraduates involved in computer vision and machine learning, database image retrieval, big data mining, and search engines, as well as to developers keen to exploit this emerging technology for commercial applications.

This book discusses how to combine type-2 fuzzy sets and graphical models to solve a range of real-world pattern recognition problems such as speech recognition, handwritten Chinese character recognition, topic modeling as well as human action recognition. It covers these recent developments while also providing a comprehensive introduction to the fields of type-2 fuzzy sets and graphical models. Though primarily intended for graduate students, researchers and practitioners in fuzzy logic and pattern recognition, the book can also serve as a valuable reference work for researchers without any previous knowledge of these fields. Dr. Jia Zeng is a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, China. Dr. Zhi-Qiang Liu is a Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, China.

Automatic personal authentication using biometric information is becoming more essential in applications of public security, access control, forensics, banking, etc. Many kinds of biometric authentication techniques have been developed based on different biometric characteristics. However, most of the physical biometric recognition techniques are based on two dimensional (2D) images, despite the fact that human characteristics are three dimensional (3D) surfaces. Recently, 3D techniques have been applied to biometric applications such as 3D face, 3D palmprint, 3D fingerprint, and 3D ear recognition. This book introduces four typical 3D imaging methods, and presents some case studies in the field of 3D biometrics. This book also includes many efficient 3D feature extraction, matching, and fusion algorithms. These 3D imaging methods and their applications are given as follows: - Single view imaging with line structured-light: 3D ear identification - Single view imaging with multi-line structured-light: 3D palmprint authentication - Single view imaging using only 3D camera: 3D hand verification - Multi-view imaging: 3D fingerprint recognition 3D Biometrics: Systems and Applications is a comprehensive introduction to both theoretical issues and practical implementation in 3D biometric authentication. It will serve as a textbook or as a useful reference for graduate students and researchers in the fields of computer science, electrical engineering, systems science, and information technology. Researchers and practitioners in industry and R&D laboratories working on security system design, biometrics, immigration, law enforcement, control, and pattern recognition will also find much of interest in this book.

The book focuses on machine learning. Divided into three parts, the first part discusses the feature selection problem. The second part then describes the application of machine learning in the classification problem, while the third part presents an overview of real-world applications of swarm-based optimization algorithms. The concept of machine learning (ML) is not new in the field of computing. However, due to the ever-changing nature of requirements in today's world it has emerged in the form of completely new avatars. Now everyone is talking about ML-based solution strategies for a given problem set. The book includes research articles and expository papers on the theory and algorithms of machine learning and bio-inspiring optimization, as well as papers on numerical experiments and real-world applications.

This book describes in detail sampling techniques that can be used for unsupervised and supervised cases, with a focus on sampling techniques for machine learning algorithms. It covers theory and models of sampling methods for managing scalability and the "curse of dimensionality", their implementations, evaluations, and applications. A large part of the book is dedicated to database comprising standard feature vectors, and a special section is reserved to the handling of more complex objects and dynamic scenarios. The book is ideal for anyone teaching or learning pattern recognition and interesting teaching or learning pattern recognition and is interested in the big data challenge. It provides an accessible introduction to the field and discusses the state of the art concerning sampling techniques for supervised and unsupervised task. Provides a comprehensive description of sampling techniques for unsupervised and supervised tasks; Describe implementation and evaluation of algorithms that simultaneously manage scalable problems and curse of dimensionality; Addresses the role of sampling in dynamic scenarios, sampling when dealing with complex objects, and new challenges arising from big data. "This book represents a timely collection of state-of-the art research of sampling techniques, suitable for anyone who wants to become more familiar with these helpful techniques for tackling the big data challenge." M. Emre Celebi, Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science, University of Central Arkansas "In science the difficulty is not to have ideas, but it is to make them work" From Carlo Rovelli

This edited collection will provide an overview of the field of physiological computing, i.e. the use of physiological signals as input for computer control. It will cover a breadth of current research, from brain-computer interfaces to telemedicine.